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This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in
foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published
in Le Nouvel Observateur.

(BEIJING)  Every Sunday at 8:30 a.m. sharp, you see them coming to the
unwelcoming square in the middle of the university neighborhood in Beijing.
Skinny young girls dressed in jeans and wearing ponytails, elegant couples
in their 40s, distinguished men who look like retired teachers: they all
gather here with a funny mix of hesitation and bravery on their faces.
Minutes later, antiriot police intervene and arrest them without
encountering any resistance. On the bus that takes them to the police
station, they open their prayer books and start singing liturgical songs.

The people who so bravely defy the formidable security forces every week
belong to the Protestant Shouwang church, the biggest and best-known "house"
church in Beijing. Shouwang means "to keep watch" in Mandarin. Notoriously
independent, its attendees refuse to let themselves be absorbed by the official
"patriotic" church, which sits entirely in the government's fold. This
autonomous group of worshipers holds its services at one of its
member's homes or in a simple conference room rented for the
occasion.
(See pictures of the making of modern China.)

The devotees elect their ministers  the members of the small
committee of elders charged with governing the church  and are deeply dedicated
to the life of their community.

"We have absolutely no political agenda, and we are not opposed to the
government," a Shouwang official who is now under house arrest recently
said. "We only want one thing: to freely practice our religion."

So why are the Chinese authorities so dead set against the church? Several
dozen Shouwang devotees are detained every week. Since the beginning of the
civil-disobedience movement, more than 300 of them have been questioned by
police and pressured into signing a disavowal of their spiritual guide
before being freed. Six Shouwang members have nevertheless been
assigned to house arrest in recent months, with rumors circulating that
they'll soon be thrown in jail.

According to Bob Fu of China Aid, an American NGO that focuses on the
life of China's Christians, Beijing has always had a very bad opinion of
organized groups, whatever they might be.
(See pictures of China at 60.)

Founded in 1993 by the charismatic minister Jin Tianming, who was then a
young chemical-engineering graduate of the prestigious Tsinghua University,
Shouwang has seen its number of devotees grow from 10 to 1,000 over the past 15
years. This has attracted the ire of the authorities, who have constantly
harassed them and even forced them to change headquarters more than 20
times.

"Two recent events explain the government's attitude," says Fu. "First,
there was the fact that in 2010, Shouwang was preparing to send 200 delegates
from around the country to the international evangelical conference in South
Africa."

Alarmed by their capacity to coordinate and their desire to present
themselves as the legitimate representatives of Chinese Protestantism, the
government banned the delegates from leaving the country. "And then the
'jasmine revolutions' started," Fu continues. "Fearing [the Arab world's revolutionary
spirit] would spread, Beijing decided to break Shouwang down."

In 2010, Shouwang worshipers managed to gather $6 million in donations. The
money would have bought them an entire floor of a building in the university
neighborhood. But the sale was canceled, under pressure from authorities.
The church had to settle instead for a big conference room, rented from a
posh restaurant. Several months later, that contract was canceled as well,
for the same reasons, leaving the devotees without any roof over their
heads.
(See TIME's photo-essay "A New Look at Old Shanghai.")

"They would like to split us up or, even better, dissolve us altogether,"
says one of the Shouwang worshipers. "We will never allow that to happen.
We have not turned ourselves to the Savior to find ourselves listening to
so-called ministers who are bureaucrats in reality and who follow the orders
of the Communist Party's atheists!"

With its 40 biblical reading groups, choir, catechism and faithful
(typically members of the new bourgeoisie  professors, doctors, lawyers,
students and even party members), Shouwang gains dozens of new converts
each month. For the regime, it is the strongest symbol of the wave of
religious conversion that has swept the country of late. Urban,
educated, disgusted by the "red" discourse served by the media and fed up
even with the cult of consumerism, the new, Christ-conscious Chinese upper
class is on a moral collision course with a government that it perceives as
soulless.

The numbers speak for themselves. A survey conducted in 2006 indicated that
about 300 million Chinese (31% of the population) practice a religion.
Government estimates put that number far lower. Among Chinese religious
practitioners, two-thirds declared themselves Buddhists or Taoists. The
remaining third (100 million people) are Christians.

A leaked report dating from the same year suggested that the real number of
Chinese Christians is closer to 130 million  up from just 5 million in 1949,
when Mao rose to power. Roughly four-fifths are Protestants. In the past 60
years, in other words, the number of Chinese Christians has multiplied by a
factor of 25. They now make up 7% to 10% of the population, meaning
that Christianity is quite possibly the second religion in China.
(See how China detained dozens of Easter worshipers.)

The growth of Christianity is all the more remarkable considering it
occurred despite decades of bloody persecution under Mao, who viewed the
religion as a "foreign" doctrine used to serve the interests of capitalist
imperialism. Christianity has now adapted to the local realities and is no
longer seen as a strange faith imported from elsewhere. Millions of new
devotees are convinced that China will become Christian in a matter of two
or three decades.